Blast of Silence (1961)

Rats - Human and Rodent - Blast of Silence review by CH

How many can remember their birth? The question comes to mind with the ripely symbolic opening of Blast of Silence (1961) as a voiceover accompanies a black screen which, little by little, reveals a glow of light: a train is moving through a long tunnel and brings into view New York’s Penn Station.

This makes quite a souvenir of that splendid, soon-to-be-destroyed edifice - an emblem of the death which lurks in the film’s every moment. There disembarks a man as alone as he was on the day he emerged into the world - a figure at odds with the Christmas celebrations, all lights and jostling jollity, throughout a brilliantly filmed city. He, Frank Bono, is played by Allen Baron who also wrote and directed this, his first film, which takes as its starting point the familiar figure of the solitary gunman. He is in town on a mission to take out a gang leader who leads a life of suburban respectability while, on his nefarious proceeds, keeps a lover in a small apartment in one of the city’s brownstones whose common parts are tended by a memorably vocal and grovelling cleaner, Ruth Kaner.

It hardly gives anything away to suggest that, in its seventy-seven minutes’ running time, things will not end well. The very presence of a frequent voice-over which, uniquely uses the second person (“you”), indicates that a moral can be drawn at every turn.

Bono, attentive as he remains to the essentials of his trade, is wearying - and is disconcerted when visiting a more-than-corpulent fixer who lives in one-room squalour with cages of pet rats. This unlikely figure, wonderfully played by Larry Tucker, provides Bono’s link to somebody who can supply the necessary revolver and silencer.

Bono’s pivotal weakness is to succumb when somebody from their shared orphanage resurfaces in a restaurant. Bono accepts that invitation to a party (dig, man, that carpetbound pea race), whose main attraction is an alluring gal who had earlier got away: Molly McCarthy, another of those who, alas, got away when, like Ruth Kaner, they should have appeared in much more.

Rarely has New York - from Fifth Avenue to Harlem, with quite a view from the Staten Island ferry - been so well caught as it is here. This was the work of cinematographer Merrill Brody who was also the film’s producer and brought on board as composer Mayer Kupferman whose jazz score, including a bass and bongo-driven vocal item in the Village Barn club, adds to a relentless narrative.

Released at the end of 1961, it was ambiguously reviewed by Eugene Archer in the New York Times as “a curious little film... simultaneously awkward and pretentious... this do-it-yourself team obviously wanted to be offbeat and ‘arty’ while still conforming to Hollywood’s tested formulas”. A second-on-the-bill item for Universal, it vanished soon after, but enough people, including Martin Scorsese, saw it for this sleeper’s reputation to wake again decades later and find true appreciation of, in Archer’s phrase, its “minimum of technicana”. Apparently, it was made because - a film subject in itself - Baron was instrumental in smuggling back from Cuba the filming equipment used there for Errol Flynn’s last film. Part of the deal, including a close-run thing with one of Cuba’s cuckolded gangsters, was that Baron got to use those cameras for his Blast of Silence. To add to this picaresque history, the New York authorities had not given permission for filming in the city,. Much of it was, perforce, done from the seclusion of a moving van while Baron paced those sidewalks after, at short notice, he gave himself the part which Peter Falk had to decline after being offered one that actually paid.

For all his cavils, Archer (who identified the voiceover as being in “gutteral Brooklynese”) praised the “spontaneous vigor that augurs well for the director’s future”. As it happened, Baron was to make only two more films and instead directed some episodes of many television series. If they are no longer